


Resurrection

by Wallwalker



Category: Equilibrium (2002)
Genre: Character Study, Community: fic_on_demand, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-04
Updated: 2009-12-04
Packaged: 2017-10-04 04:06:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wallwalker/pseuds/Wallwalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What does it feel like, when one begins to feel?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Resurrection

**Author's Note:**

> Written for kneazles for [Fic On Demand](http://community.livejournal.com/fic_on_demand).

I am convinced that all feeling begins as an awareness of being suddenly unwell.

That's no surprise, really - feeling may be the natural state for humanity, just as it's natural for animals to live by blind instinct. But when one has been raised from birth in a state of equilibrium, all base emotional responses suppressed, the sudden cessation of control is unnerving, to say the least. I remember... I remember collapsing into tears at the sound of thunder, and once I went into an ecstatic sort of frenzy at the feel of the blood flowing through my own veins.

There's a horrible conflict that goes on in the mind at that point. The logical mind, that which must rule the man of Libria, desperately wants to return to its state of dominance, and the urge to continue the dose is only counterbalanced by the equally strong urgings of the animal mind. But human nature - such a glib statement, isn't it, as if all humans were innately the same - human nature inevitably wins out. A man deprived of one dose will likely never submit to another, not without coercion. That is the reason why so many respectable citizens fall to sense offense - simple humanity, nothing more.

I was free to do as I wished, as a member of the Council, so long as I acted with the utmost discretion and care. It was a reward of sorts, the compensation for the burden we bore as Councilmen. And it was always the first of all the things I tried that haunted me. The first time I cried, frightened by thunder - frightened, a grown man and trained Cleric! Ridiculous as it was, I curled up on the bed in my private chambers and wept like a baby. The first time I noticed the feeling of sunlight on my face, the warmth and color of it, the way that I began to see hints of color even in the drabness of Libria. The first contact with another feeling human, moans and gasps and heat, the sight of that stern and utterly _fascist_ face melting into its own ecstatic revelations....

After a while the sense of being unwell fades into something else, something infinitely precious to me. It is the sense of at last being well and truly _alive._

The end of feeling, then, must always be a resurrection.


End file.
